A quiet little spot where Rod Mollise shares his adventures and misadventures...

Sunday, October 27, 2013

Space Race Redux

I usually
try to stick purty close to the subject of amateur astronomy in this blog, muchachos,
but I do stray once in a while. Mostly to “space” and to the current state of
the U.S. manned space program. And also to Unk’s personal space program, which takes place on the dining room table of
Chaos Manor South. In other words: the
Moon is near about full, it is raining to beat the band, and Unk has not had
the opportunity to pursue any of the cool observing programs with the cool new gadgets
he hopes to tell you about in the near future.

When we last
left N.A.S.A., the Constellation system, which included the Apollo Command
Module/Service Module-like Orion spacecraft
had been cancelled. It’s back, but in reduced/changed form. The Orion capsule
itself never went away; it continued to be developed because, it was said, it fits in with the Administration’s space goals—whatever those are.

What changed,
mostly, was that the both the big Ares V booster that was to be used to propel Orion on deep
space missions, and the Ares I, which would be used for low Earth orbit missions, were eliminated. A new-concept, the “Space Launch System,”
replaced them. In other words, Ares, which was fairly far along in development, was cancelled for SLS, which won't get off the ground for quite a while yet. The
Agency suggests a test flight could take place in 2017, but that is a big "maybe" in my book. The SLS does have the advantage of versatility. The basic Block 1 is capable of lifting Orion into low Earth orbit, while the full-up Block II configuration can be used for lunar/interplanetary missions. That's if the Block 2 configuration is ever built. I am skeptical about that, since it's already been cheapened/downgraded.

How about a mission for Orion? That’s where things
get even more murky. A lot has been proposed including the obvious, lunar
missions, and the far-reaching, Mars missions, at least to Phobos if not the
surface. None of this seems to have taken hold with the Congress or the
Administration, however. The Obama
troops seem to be locked into a flight to a near Earth asteroid for some
unclear reason, and recently came out with an idea that seems “far-fetched,”
to say the least.

That is the Asteroid Retrieval Mission, “ARM,”
a.k.a. “Asteroid Initiative.” The plan, such as it is, is to retrieve a “small”
near earth asteroid and place it in lunar orbit where it can be studied by both
unmanned and manned craft. On the face of it, it sounds reasonable enough. When
you dig a little deeper, though, it is an utter non-starter for several
reasons.

Start with
the reaction on the part of the scientifically illiterate public and
scientifically illiterate politicians to the idea of NASA monkeying around with
an asteroid even as far away as the Moon. It won’t just be U.S. politicians who
have a hissy fit about this, either. Every cotton-picking politico the world
over will raise the roof to make political hay, because they are actually afraid
of what might happen if NASA has an “oops” moment, and just because it
is the U.S. doing it.

There is
also the question of what this asteroid business would do to NASA and its other
programs. The ARM mission from start to finish will consume at least ten years of
NASA’s time and money. If history is a guide, it will cost far more than the agency “thinks”
it will, and if it survives at least an election cycle or two it is likely to become
NASA’s only mission and eat all the
agency’s dollars.

If this mission
were overwhelmingly important and couldn’t be accomplished any other way, it
would be justifiable, but it is not. Anything this grandiose scheme could accomplish
could be done as well by unmanned spacecraft, which have already proved their
mettle in asteroid/comet rendezvous and flybys.

Actually, I
am not worried about ARM gobbling all of NASA’s money. Beyond preliminary studies, this ain’t going nowhere. Not just because of the reasons above, but because no one at NASA
seems capable of pushing big projects of any kind anymore. And there doesn't
seem to be anybody left in Congress who is a true space advocate beyond Florida
and Texas politicians concerned about jobs. This ARM idea will likely last
about as long as Bush’s space plans lasted—till the next Presidential election.

What do I
expect to happen with Orion? I believe it will get built in some form in some
limited numbers. What do I think its mission will wind up being? Maybe ferrying
astronauts to the ISS till the station’s end-of-mission (currently scheduled
for 2016) if it's flyable on a non-SLS booster in time. There is supposed to be an unmanned suborbital test of the capsule and a Delta IV next year, but I wouldn't be surprised to see that slip. Orion is expensive and overpowered as an ISS shuttle compared to SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft, anyway. After the ISS? Who the hell knows? Someone’s even pushing the idea of
“Skylab II,” using a spent upper stage to recreate the 1970s space station,
if’n you can believe that.

What do I
think should be the mission of the
Orion? That’s easy: get us back to the
Moon. Putting boots on the Moon again will be easier than
last time (ought to be, anyhow), and will give us the experience to put us on the
road to Mars. Will that happen? Some days I wake up thinking it will, other
days that it won’t—at least not in my lifetime. I don’t think we’ll have any
idea till the next Presidential election cycle is done.

That’s the cotton-picking
politicians, though. How about the Joe and Jane Sixpack? The
public might not know much about space, space travel, and NASA (the percentage
of the national budget allocated to NASA is always way overestimated by the man-in-the-street in polls).
And too many Americans are woefully scientifically illiterate. Still, it
appears they are hungry for space,
and not just the fantasy of Star Wars.

A case in
point is the recent movie Gravity.
Despite a perhaps overly simple plot and ignored scientific
principles almost to the point of silliness, the public and the critics ate it up. I don't think it was just because of the chance to see plenty of (sound accompanied)
explosions and astronaut Sandra Bullock cavorting in her skivvies, either. Space as an
adventure still has a powerful grip on the national psyche, no matter how NASA
and eight Administrations have worked to erase that. In case you are wondering, yes, Unk just fraking
loved Gravity and hopes to see it again at
least one more time.

Stage 2 Under Construction

What could
make Joe and Jane's hunger for space bubble up enough for politicians to notice and get the whole manned
spaceflight works going again? Something beyond trips to low Earth orbit where
we have been stuck for 40-years, obviously. Not pie in the sky asteroid
missions “someday,” but missions to the Moon as soon as they can be undertaken
and serious planning for Mars, now.
Do I expect to live to see any of that? Hell no, but Unk can dream, can’t he?

If NASA
can’t run a manned spaceflight program, Unk can,
at least vicariously. I’ve been building plastic space models for many a year,
which I told y’all about here. It’s a kinda-astronomy-related
activity I can pursue on cloudy nights. The point for me isn't the model
spacecraft I turn out, really, but the research and learning about them and
their history that goes into doing their construction right. I’ve gone through
periods where I’ve done little or no space modeling, and times when I’ve done a
lot. Right now, it’s more on the “lot” side.

When you are
retired, you just naturally have more hours to fill. I keep busy in the daytime writing
for Sky and Telescope and other astronomy
magazines, and I am increasing my course load at the university, but that still
leaves plenty of time to build my spaceships. There are, after all, only so
many hours of the day you can devote to playing Halo 4 on the dadgum Xbox.

What have I
been working on of late? It started with a new Saturn V. I’d done one a while back, but I wasn’t overly satisfied with the kit, a Monogram 1/144
scale job. I modified it heavily, adding detail to the engines and replacing
the completely inaccurate Command/Service module with an aftermarket one in the
form of a resin kit add-on, but it was still disappointing. I thought the
other popular Saturn kit, Airfix’s 1/144,
might be easier to get right.

It was. I
didn't have to replace the CM/SM, and while the engines of all three stages
required considerable additional scratch-built detail before they looked
anything more than pitiful, that was easier to do than it had been with the
Monogram and everything wound up looking better. The new Saturn went together right nice, and the paint job came out
purty sweet. After a lot of trying, I have finally mastered the art of painting
the black attitude striping on boosters, something that used to give me fits.

When I was
done, I was pleased with my new Saturn. It wasn’t perfect, no, but what is?
What mostly struck me, though, was how DUMB a Saturn V looks standing by itself
on a cheesy plastic base. Outside the faux Saturn at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, you would never see
one like that. A real Saturn always sat on the platform of the Crawler –Transporter next to the Launch Umbilical Tower, the “gantry.”
OK, what would I have to do to provide my Saturn with an L.U.T.?

A little
investigation seemed to reveal I was out of luck. Years ago, AMT provided a
cardboard L.U.T. diorama with their “Man in Space" kit. Unfortunately, the L.U.T.
was deleted after a little while, and I suppose if you could find a kit
that included it it would be an expensive collector’s item. The 1/200th scale Man
in Space L.U.T. was too small for my Saturn anyway. A garage type company tried to
market a genuine plastic launch tower model fairly recently, but the price of it was to
be very high, 750 fraking dollars, and it’s not clear to me whether they produced
many—if any—L.U.T.s before going under.

No launch
tower for Unk’s Saturn, then? That’s the way it looked till I did some
extensive Googling one slow day during the last months of my engineering gig.
There was, it seemed, an alternative, a
paper modelof the L.U.T. available in several scales including one for my Airfix rocket. But paper? I didn't sign on to
space modeling to play with scissors and Elmer’s glue, for god’s sake. Still,
paper spacecraft models are not unusual. It’s a sizable sub-hobby in the space
modeling game, with even NASA offering quite a few complex paper models on their
website.

It wasn’t
the basic idea of a paper model that gave me pause, but buildingone. I did some more Googling and
turned up some depressing facts: this paper kit,
produced by a talented artist, David Maier, who calls his little company
“Educraft Diversions,” can look good when completed, but it is difficult to complete. The cutting, pasting, and gluing of hundreds and
hundreds of parts, some of them tiny, has stymied more than one space modeler and
left a few folks disheveled glue-covered wrecks.

Still, if I
wanted an L.U.T. for my Saturn, this was the only way I’d get one. I was told by
my Internet space modeling buddies that there were also some good things about the
kit: the instruction manual was as clear
and easy to follow as such a thing possibly could be, and the seller was a
stand-up guy who shipped kits quickly and responded to questions promptly. I
bit the bullet, ponied up thirty bucks, and ordered a 1/144 L.U.T. off Educraft’s eBay store (you can
also order directly from their website).

The THICK instruction manual

What did I
get for my money? The kit, which was shipped in a large and sturdy mailing tube, was
made up of eighteen 11 x 17-inch sheets printed on heavy 60-pound paper. Also
included was a mini-CD with the 100-page .pdf instruction manual on it, which was a little work of art
in itself. While 18-sheets might not seem like a lot, believe you me, many, many
parts can be packed onto a single page, and, again, quite a few of them are very small
indeed.

What next?
Nothing, not for a spell. I let my L.U.T. sit for a couple of months. Ostensibly,
that was to allow the rolled pages to flatten, but that could have been
accomplished in a day or two by pressing them between heavy books. Part of the
delay was caused by me being occupied with drawing my engineering career to a
close and getting all my duckies in a row for retirement. I was also skeered of
the kit. A good look at the instructions showed it to be even more complex than
I’d feared.

Two things
got me to work: retirement and need for
an extra “project,” and the 2013 Battleship Park ModelFest. The big model show,
sponsored by the plastic modeling club here in Possum Swamp, wouldn’t take
place till October, a good 7-months away, but the looks of the L.U.T. kit
indicated I’d better get started on it if'n I wanted to enter it in the show.

So, off I
went to the local craft store, Michael's, for the needed “tools,” lots of Elmer's Glue, multiple
glue sticks, scotch tape, masking tape, sharp scissors, metal ruler, cutting
board, and a new Exacto knife. Once I got
started, I found the project was not quite
as difficult as I’d feared. After a while, I began to understand the techniques
described in the manual better, and was able to proceed fairly quickly after a
slow start.

The hardest
part of the kit turned out not to be the gantry tower itself, but the first things you build, the Crawler–Transporter deck and the “tower core,” the rectangular
support that extends the entire height of the tower. What’s hard is that the
kit parts are just the outer skin of these things. You scratch build them of
heavy cardboard and lay the kit pieces over them. That is necessary to support
the Saturn and the tower itself.

ModelFest 2013

I got
through this initial rough spot, but it took a while, and after I was done I
put the L.U.T. aside for another couple of months during the spring/summer
observing season (such as it was) when I was chasing galaxies in Chiefland and other places. With July becoming August and August
soon beginning to run out, however, I knew I had to get on the stick, and
formulated a plan that would have me devoting a couple of afternoons a week to
the tower.

I more or
less stuck to that in the course of assembling the eighteen platforms (yep)
that make up the gantry levels. That was followed by folding and gluing 50+
small cubical and rectangular parts that represent the equipment on the tower
levels. That done, I took another break for the Almost Heaven Star Party, and, after I got home and got up the
gumption, resumed by folding and gluing the tower girders that support the
platforms.

None of this
was exactly easy, but one thing maintained throughout construction: unlike some similarly whacked-out kits of all
kinds I’ve assembled over the years, from astronomy gear, to ham radio equipment, to
plastic models, the L.U.T. actually seemed to
want to go together. It was never a matter of it not being possible to
assemble the thing, it was just a matter of lots of work and lots of time.

Coming down
to the wire with just over a week to go, the tower was finally together, freestanding,
and looking right good. Not perfect, but OK. The bottom 12-levels were fine, but the topmost sections (you do the tower in three parts), and
especially the last couple of platforms gave me trouble, and came out
slightly lopsided.

Not too shabby, though. That was the good
news. The bad news was that there was only a week to go and plenty of work
remaining. Most dauntingly, I had to roll, glue, and attach almost two hundred cross/support beams. And I
was only able to devote one day to that. For that reason, the little paper tubes
had to be taped into rolls instead of glued, which would have looked better.

Those damnable
beams installed, I still had the swing arms, the service arms extending from
the gantry to the booster, to complete. AND the detailed Colby crane that sits
atop the launch tower. With two days remaining before ModelFest 2013, the only
way I was able to finish was by simplifying. Following some advice in the
instructions, I glued the swing arms directly to their supports rather than
trying to fabricate hinges for them. I also left off quite a few of the highly
detailed parts that go on the crane and some of the swing-arms. In the end, I
only added enough detail to indicate,
to suggest, appearances and functions.

Finally, it
was done, on the Friday morning before the show. You know what? It didn't look half-bad.
Miss Dorothy, who’d been kind enough to donate at least half her dining room
table to the project for months, was impressed, and that alone was plenty of
reward for my hours and hours of work on this crazy kit. Frankly, I could
hardly believe I’d actually finished the dadburned thing.

After that,
ModelFest was almost anticlimactic. We had a lot of fun at the big show, which
was held at Battleship Memorial Park, which
is home to the Battleship Alabama and
the submarine U.S.S. Drum. Only
downer? Saturday morning was predicted to be rainy and my model was made of
paper. Miss D. and I got it inside the show venue, the Aircraft Pavilion, which
houses the Park’s amazing collection of airplanes, just in
time. Not ten minutes later the rain was freaking pouring.

How did we
make out with our entry? As usual, I didn't win a thing. The L.U.T. actually
looked good enough that I thought it, together with the Saturn V, might have chance.
It might have had one under different circumstances. Unfortunately, contest
officials declared the rocket/gantry combo was a “diorama,” and would have to
be entered in that category. I would not be up against the OK Gemini capsule, Explorer
1, and Jupiter C entered in the “real space” category, but against
near-professional quality World War II armor dioramas (the person who built 'em was selling others on a dealer table).

That was OK.
I would liked to have taken a plaque home, but the large amount of interest and
the kind comments the L.U.T. garnered were a good consolation prize. Honestly,
there was no getting around the fact it was paper, and that I had not been
able to execute it quite perfectly.

I didn't win
a raffle prize, either, but that was OK, too. Almost all the kits offered as
prizes were ships and aircraft, the focus of the show, and something that
doesn't interest this real space modeler. I did BUY something cool from
one of the many dealers, a huge 1/12th scale Mercury capsule kit from Atomic
City Models I’d been yearning for for a couple of years. I probably paid a
little too much for it, but the kind Miss Dorothy decided it would make a
perfect Christmas gift for old Unk. Hope springs eternal, and I hope this will be a winning entry for me
next year. Which will be my third ModelFest—“third time’s the charm,” right?

Despite the
L.U.T.’s less than stellar showing, it had been a fun day. We lunched at one of
our fave Causeway joints, R&R Seafood,
just down the road from the Park. Strangely, neither one of us ordered seafood.
Unk got the BBQ chicken sandwich and mound o’ fries and was right happy, and
Miss D’s roast beef looked yummy. Back at Battleship Park, I toured the Alabama and the Drum, and had a good time doing that despite rain that kept me off
their weather-decks until late afternoon.

The Drum, a Gato Class submarine from WWII, is beautifully restored and
maintained inside and is undergoing a fairly extensive restoration of
her hull. My ham friends may be aware the Drum was the sub Wayne Green,
one of the more famous members of our fraternity/sorority, served on during the
war. It was cool to read the “sailing list” posted in the sub and see good, ol’
W2NSD’s name on it.

Yeah, seeing Wayne's name there was cool...but it seems poignant, now. When I finally got around to reading the November QST a few days later, I found out Wayne made silent key (SK) a few weeks ago at age 91. There will never be another W2NSD, an iconoclast and visionary who helped revolutionize ham radio, published 73 Magazine, and became even more famous for his many computer magazines, which included the never-equaled Byte. 73, and good DX, OM...W2NSD de AC4WY.... SK.

The Alabama? She is magnificent inside and
out. She is also a little creepy.
Despite being a devoted fan of the pea-picking Ghost Adventures, I am not convinced of the reality of haints—not in the daytime, anyhow—but I
gotta say, when I go below on BB60, I feel a certain something. A slight air of gloom or
tension almost like there’s some kind of emotional residue that charges
the old girl like an enormous battery 70 years down the line.

“Alright,
Unk. That’s cool and all. But can we please get back to amateur astronomy?” We
dang sure can, Skeezix, and I’ve got some Good Stuff lined up, including reviews/tests
of the RSPEC spectroscopy program and
a spectroscopic grating to go with it. AND a new (fairly new, anyhow) planetary
camera, the Mallincam SSC, that I hope to try out Real Soon Now. Oh, and
there’s the 2013 Deep South Regional Star Gaze, Unk and Miss Dorothy’s “home”
star party, to report on. In other words, STAY TUNED, muchachos.

Nota Bene: You can see many more images of the Park and ModelFest on Unk's Facebook page, campers (Photos/Albums).

Next Time: A night under the stars with the Celestron Edge f/7 reducer…

Rod ,Congrats on your retirement hope you have plenty to persue your hobbies , for me I am still sticking it out at the FAA Engineering Lab inspite of the government silliness furloughs. You are going to love that 1/12 scale Mercury a lot of documentation exists online in the model building forums. I have one of the 1/96 REVEL Saturns I plan to work on when time permits. Haven't been on Cloudy Nights much it's been one heck of a year post Super Storm Sandy and the rotten weather since I really miss observing hopefully things will improve. I still read your blog for trips down memory lane they are the highlight of my weekend , I thought I would post because for the last couple of post no one has commented. Now you know at least someone reads them.

Nice entry, as always, Unk. This little brazilian down here had a passion for space modeling too, when I was a child, at 13 or 14. At the time, NO space models here in Brazil, at all, and even if it were, NO money to talk about, so... paper! I remember doing some Roossian ones, Voktok and Voskhod, and even the Soyuz, with its weird spherical capsules. Apollo and the LM was the tops of my "career" as a model builder. LM spidery, alien-y appearance was very difficult to get, specially with so little reference material. No internet, of course, and a very frail public library in a little rural city. Mostly magazines, LIFE photos and such. You, sire, are awesome!Thank you for sharing!And, Saturn V stands very dignified in your model, a true homage to one of the greatest achievements of humankind and America. Stand Tall.